[ed. note, 04/04: Our apologies to all the readers (and fellow bloggers) following the progressive blogging project; we mistakenly reviewed the seventh inning of Friday's game instead of Saturday's. Our only solace is that it can perhaps provide good memories of the win for Cardinal fans.]

[ed. note: This post is the seventh installment of the United Cardinal Bloggers progressive game blog. See also the sixth inning and eighth inning. Our entry is dedicated to the memory of Buzz Bissinger. May he rest in peace.]

Coming off his worst (45 FIGS) and longest (33 batters faced, 124 pitches) outing of the season, in which he yielded three home runs, Adam Wainwright kept the ball in the park and walks to a minimum. After the first two batters of the seventh, TLR pulled the Cardinal ace in a decision that appeared to have been based on what Wainwright said during the mound visit. Wainwright had retired Mark DeRosa leading off, but then Geovany Soto slammed a somewhat flat — by Wainwright’s standards — curveball (75 mph/15" break) that was too high in the zone into center for a single. Wainwright had been getting better results earlier in the game with bigger, slower curveballs in the 71-74 mph range and break of 16-17". He finished with a nifty 66 FIGS, his third-best start this year:

By bringing in Randy Flores to face Pie, TLR forced Lou Piniella to use two consecutive pinch hitters, neither of which was the Cubs’ best, Daryle Ward. La Russa removed Flores after he induced a forceout, which might’ve been a double play had Johnson’s speed not forced a hurried throw from Brendan Ryan. Kyle McClellan then entered and met some bad "luck" with a bloop single from Cedeno. Facing Alfonso Soriano with the highest-leverage plate appearance of the game to that point (3.45), K-Mac struck out the Cub star.

In the bottom half of the inning, the Cubs must’ve felt that their curse had followed them all the way to the Mound City (though, to be sure, they brought some of it upon themselves by bringing in Bob Howry to work to Rick Ankiel and Albert Pujols, who had a whopping .464 GPA against him; so it actually could’ve been worse). Ankiel’s hot grounder ate up the normally surehanded Derrick Lee, and then the spotlight (searchlight?) shone on Alfonso Soriano, who is only slightly better in left field than he was at second base. We asked for some friendlier scoring earlier in the week on Albert Pujols, and Soriano stayed far enough away from Pujols’s popup to avoid being charged with what surely should have been an error. Someone should’ve caught it, but it’s all the same as the Cubs’ game DER goes (.676, below league average of .700).

That added two more baserunners to Troy Glaus’s record pace of runners on base this season: he had six more tonight, bringing his season total to 118. Let’s see which Cardinal batters have had the most ROBs in a single season:

Sadly, Glaus has stranded about 82% of those runners and did so with the two runners this time. But as soon as the wind started blowing out to center, YaMo lifted his two-out drive into the gap. Soriano, proving that leftward movement along the defensive spectrum isn’t always a smooth transition, missed it for a ground-rule double. The play, which padded the Cardinal lead to two, was the biggest to that point in the game by Win Probability Added, and upped the Cardinals’ win expectancy to 88.8%. Yes, that number would go down later, thanks to Sorianso, but here’s a fun stat to help you to rub the salt into your Cub friend’s wounds: If you consider Soriano’s seventh-inning defense, his net WPA for the game was -1.699 (.091 for batting, minus 0.62 and 1.17).

This entry was posted by Pip on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 2:46 am and is filed under analysis, progressive blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.